Writing about food since 2004.
Category
How To
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How To Always Get A Seat at a Crowded Coffee Shop
Every day I go to a coffee shop to work on my book. And every day I witness the same phenomenon: people poke their heads through the door, look at all the crowded tables, sigh a heavy sigh and leave. I want to yell out: “Don’t leave! You’re giving up too easily!” But since most…
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How To Make A Good Cup of Coffee
This weekend on Facebook, my friend Molly wrote that she was “constitutionally incapable of making a decent cup of coffee.” I related to this because, for the past few years, I had the same problem. The lowest moment came when, upon grinding my own beans, I overdid it, clogged my coffee maker and a black…
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Revelations of the Kitchen Freezer (Or: Hot Homemade Cookies, Biscuits & Dinner Rolls Whenever You Want Them)
Sometimes we think we know things, but we don’t really know them. For example: for a long time I’ve known that you can put unbaked cookies, biscuits and/or dinner rolls in the freezer, instead of the oven, and that after letting them freeze on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets, you can put them in Ziplock bags…
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Very Last Minute Thanksgiving Recipes: Butterhorns, Roasted Brussels Sprouts, Port Wine Cranberry Sauce & Food Processor Apple Pie
There are crafty food bloggers out there (one might call them “smart” food bloggers, or “food bloggers who actually know what they’re doing”) who see a holiday coming and WHAM BLAM they have 1,000 holiday recipes posted weeks ahead of time so by the time the holiday rolls around you’re saturated with great holiday content.…
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An Excess of Egg Whites? Make Pavlova
If you make the ice cream in the previous post, you’re going to find yourself with an excess of egg whites: specifically, six egg whites that you should not, by any means, throw away. Resourcefulness is what separates good home cooks from great ones; and there, with that bowl of egg whites, you can make…
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How To Make A Caesar Salad
I make Caesar salads all the time and whenever I do, I forget to take pictures. Maybe it’s because it’s such a loosey-goosey process–how much garlic, how much anchovy, how much Parmesan & lemon is all a matter of taste–but, still, my Caesar salad is very good (as evidenced by this post). So, instead of…
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How To Roast Red Peppers
As autumn conquers summer, and I stroll through the Union Square Farmer’s Market, I start to panic and worry about all the fruits and vegetables I didn’t buy during those precious few warm-weather months. Which explains why, during one Saturday saunter, I came home with four giant red peppers. I didn’t really have a red…
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Cooking For A Group, Part II
You may recall a post, back from September 15th, 2008 called “How To Cook For A Group.” In that post, I whined about how I wasn’t good at cooking for a group: “The truth is that to impress a large group of people, you’ve got to cook large. Some folks are better at cooking large…
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How To Make Your Own Lobster Rolls
There’s a lot of hubbub in New York, lately, about lobster rolls. Apparently there’s a glut of lobsters (see this New York Magazine article) and new lobster shacks are sprouting up all over the city. My loyalty, as always, belongs to Pearl Oyster Bar which makes the best lobster roll I’ve ever had. But did…
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What To Do With Meyer Lemons
I’m trying not to be dramatic here, but I can’t avoid the second half of this sentence: if you haven’t had a Meyer lemon, you haven’t lived! Yes, that was a pretty dramatic thing to say, but let’s look at the facts: (1) A regular lemon isn’t very subtle, it’s an acidic attack on your…
